Orange Surprise
by Sleepless Poet
Summary: Slaine Troyard is a big picture kind of guy. Intuition, instinct, assimilating the puzzle pieces into a picture. Inaho Kaizuka is everything Slaine is not. Logical, reasonable, precise. He always knows what he's doing, never guessing. He leaves puzzles apart because he's too busy looking at the details of a single piece. This is the story of what happens when their minds overlap.
1. 1

1

 _Why is an orange smart?_

 _Because it concentrates._

* * *

An endless sky like a seamless, flowing garment—if he swallowed it, could he absorb those infinite possibilities? If the sky was in his soul, then that made the clouds, the stars, the sun. . . what? Cloudgazing and starwatching, eclipses and meteor showers; implant them in the soul and you get. . . what? Slaine smiled. Something beautiful. A human with the sky in them, a human with wings. Not an angel, not a dove. A human with wings would be a creature that hides away from the light because it's not perfect. It would confuse good with perfect and use its flaws to hide its beauty because if you're not perfect, you must be bad, right? Because it would be so simple to believe that millions of bad things outweigh a few good things. So yes, this human with wings, it would be something like. . . a bat.

But if you never weighed the good against the bad, if you never looked at the numbers, never quantified, how could you know for sure?

Slaine spread his arms and legs in the grass, like a snow angel. But there was no snow, and he was no angel. The wind blew his hair over his eyes, and he closed them. The grass undulated all around him, but beneath him, all still. An Earth that rotated and revolved, lives that rose and fell to the steady rhythm of a breathing chest, all that went on while Slaine, well, he lay in the grass. His mind whirred, it pirouetted, it soared. It did everything but move him, and that was just how it was.

But it wasn't his mind that was doing these things. If it were, he would be going somewhere. No, it was his soul, and all he could do was feel. Dream, think, and feel.

What would happen if he dared to move?

He reached an arm into the air, clenching and unclenching his fingers. Something impeded his source of light, but he knew the clouds hadn't shifted because the heat and light exposure over the rest of his body was the same.

"Who's leaning over me?" Slaine said, lowering his arm.

"See for yourself."

He didn't recognize the voice. Male, about his age, monotone. Quiet, but not in the sense that he seemed shy. No, he had spoken at a precise volume, like he had calculated the minimum volume requisite to be heard at his distance from Slaine. Yeah, people didn't really do that, but that was the impression Slaine got, and for the boy who thought with his soul, intuition was everything.

Slaine rolled onto his side and covered his ears. "Say that again." Say anything. He just needed to hear him speak again.

"You heard me the first time."

The impression he got from the boy's voice was the same as the first time. Calculated. Quantified. Measured. The very things Slaine thought he wanted in his life. Opposites to his estimation, qualification, intuition.

Slaine pulled his hood over his head. He wanted to keep pushing this. A part of him wanted this beautiful concept—logic—to breakdown because if it didn't, he would lose something when he opened his eyes. The logic would be dissolved and diluted when it was put into a body, put with a face. Humanity corrupts pure logic and converts it into a usable form, like the nitrogen cycle.

"How"—Slaine pulled the strings on his hood taut—"how do you _know_ I heard you? Why are you so certain?"

 _And why do_ I _want to know so badly?_ Because maybe, just maybe, if he knew the reason that reason itself was certain of itself, perhaps that would be enough for him. Perhaps he would be able to be certain enough to have faith in something, too.

Slaine yelped when hands, not his own, jerked his hood off and pried his hands away from his ears. Steady, confident breath hovered above his ear. It was tantalizingly close, the secret knowledge. If pure logic was air, he was close enough to breathe it in, to take it into his body and let his blood carry it everywhere.

"The volume of air intake during respiration controls voice volume." As if to prove a point, he had dropped his voice to a whisper, and Slaine felt that the force of the breathing against his ear was softer. "If you know the range of average human hearing, you can judge how loudly you need to speak." He smirked into a laugh, and the airy sound tickled the hair around Slaine's ear. "The brain estimates this process for you subconsciously, to a certain degree of accuracy."

"I know that." He really did. Slaine rolled onto his back, and his shoulder hit a pair of shoes. "I asked why you sounded so sure of yourself when you said I heard you."

"Because I calculated."

And then Slaine's eyes opened, not of their own, and somehow he knew, all of him knew, that there was pure, elemental logic in the boy kneeling next to him. It was logic in its unaltered form, and he could use it. The wind tussled his brown hair, sweeping his bangs away from his face as if nature invited him to peer into the face of reason. The sun struck his eyes just right so that they toed the infinitesimally thin line between red and brown. They were warm, and they were cold, those eyes. The oxymoronic balance between all that could and could not be, it was. . .

"Brilliant," Slaine breathed.

The boy raised an eyebrow. "Honestly, what goes through your head?"

A pink the color of blooming cherry blossom petals dusted Slaine's cheeks. _It wouldn't make sense even if I told you_. But he wanted it to make sense; he wanted logic to find meaning in the things that held none for him.

"The sky," Slaine said. "The sky goes through my head." _And deep down into my soul._

The other boy leaned back on his palms, as if he sensed— _calculated_ —that this would be a long conversation. "It would have been clearer and more precise to say, 'I'm thinking about the sky.'"

Slaine lay on his side, facing toward the boy. If he was going to make himself comfortable, then there was no reason Slaine shouldn't, too.

"But I'm not," Slaine said, "thinking about the sky."

"Then, what—"

"You. Brilliant was the adjective I used to modify you."

"I'm flattered."

Slaine snorted. So, logic had a sense of humor, huh?

"When a stranger approaches you while your eyes are closed and you're prone and vulnerable, the natural reaction is to open your eyes. To examine the intruder as a potential threat."

Hiding a smile, Slaine marveled. From A to B to—

"Why did you disregard that reaction? Are you that trusting?"

To C. Brilliant.

"Because there was something beautifully impossible and impossibly beautiful that I didn't want to break," Slaine answered. "And no, it hasn't broken yet. It's still here."

The boy merely nodded slowly, as if he were thinking. As if he were wondering what that thing could be. Slaine supposed he couldn't figure it out, because a moment later, he asked, "What is it?"

"If I told you, you'd just laugh."

"Probably."

Slaine, after several minutes of silence between them—silence he imagined the other boy spent thinking about that beautiful thing—sat up. He said, "Ever heard of synesthesia?"

A curt nod.

"Orange," Slaine said, standing. "You're orange to me. And not just the color."

He held out a hand to help the other boy up. Slender, analytical fingers grasped his hand, palpating him, collecting information. It wasn't just his intuition this time. He knew, he was certain, because he felt Orange's fingertips brush a scar on the belly of his wrist, inside his cardigan sleeve. Slaine jerked his hand away, but he seemed to be expecting that because he adjusted to the loss of support quickly, without falling.

"Fly away, Bat."

Slaine laughed into the sky. Another impression. _He was thinking about me, too._ And how perfect it was, that the boy who thought with his soul had met the boy who thought with his mind.

* * *

For Michael. Merry Christmas.


	2. 2

2

 _What did one bat say to another?_

 _Let's hang around together!_

* * *

Slaine wondered what it felt like, for them. How Democritus' world view changed after he postulated the existence of atoms. What Oppenheimer and Einstein felt after the first atomic bomb exploded. What hung upon Athenian souls after their democracy executed Socrates. There must be times when humans know, intuitively or logically, that something in their world has changed and that they can no longer go on looking at things the way they used to.

Meeting Orange wasn't like the discovery of gravity or a nuclear chain reaction. It was a small, Lilliputian wonder, something more akin to the magnitude of a butterfly landing on your nose. You knew butterflies existed, you'd seen them day after day in your routine life, but when one landed on you and fluttered its wings, it was something different. It just wouldn't be possible to look at butterflies the same way again, because every time you saw one, you'd think of that one moment. And from then on, it would color your experience.

 _Color it orange._

But Slaine didn't know if he wanted his world to change, however insignificantly. He was in limbo, and he knew it, but he didn't dare reach for heaven for risk of falling into hell. He knew a terribly beautiful secret, he had seen the face of logic, but he did what his intuitive soul begged him not to do. He pretended that he had not seen anything. He told himself that his impressions had been wrong and that he had overrated intelligence as some power of higher genius. He tried to go back to the perspective where Orange was only another empty face in the lecture halls, where orange was just another color.

Slaine did all these things, told himself that his strategy was working, yet all the while he still watched Orange. He still observed the butterflies with his repressed hope that one of them would land on him again. They shared several general education classes together, seeing as they were both freshmen, and on top of that, Slaine hadn't yet declared a major. Slaine tended to sit in the upper rows in the back of the room—he hated attention—while Orange, as far as he could tell, gravitated toward the front of the room. This left him free to watch the brunet openly. He didn't participate in class frequently, and as it appeared to Slaine, he was only vocal on the difficult questions, the ones no one else volunteered to answer. He rarely moved or fidgeted in his seat—unlike Slaine—and had stolid posture, again, unlike Slaine. Some days he lingered after the class had ended to speak with the professors, often asking them questions that resulted in long, complicated illustrations on the whiteboard. Topics that were often beyond the scope of a simple 101 class. Slaine did this too, sometimes, specifically in their introductory biology classes. It was in the life sciences that Slaine found himself so preoccupied with the lecture that he had no time or interest in gazing at Orange.

Today was one of those days. Slaine was sitting on top of one of the tables in the front of the room, everyone else having already gone, as he watched with rapt attention as his professor explained the nodes of the heart and the conduction of signals between them. By the time they had finished at the board and Slaine was heading back to his seat to grab his bag, he was so inside his own head that he didn't notice Orange waiting for him in the back of the room.

 _Damn._

A week and a half of pretending Orange's existence was no more fascinating than anyone else's failed with a few seconds of staring him in the face.

"Inko thinks talking to you is the optimal course of action," he said, simply. His logic made everything seem simple. It hid the sprawling calculations that led to the conclusions. It was simple, mysteriously so.

"As opposed to what other 'courses of action'?" Slaine occasionally glanced up at Orange's face while he was putting his books in his canvas bag.

"Clandestinely scrutinizing you."

Slaine coughed, as if the action would expel the surprise that stole his breath. "Remind me to thank Inko." To say nothing of the fact that Slaine himself had been doing exactly the same. "I'm sure you're peculiar enough not to mind casually chatting in a biology lab with dead cats on the table, but as someone more versed in the social graces"—that was a lie—"I do have a problem with that."

Orange blinked, one eyebrow raised. Slaine wasn't sure what emotion his face belied until the brunet said, "Sorry, but I missed your point amidst the overwhelming self-satisfaction."

Slaine smiled a little and rolled his eyes. "You okay with lunch at Einstein's Bagles?"

Orange took the hint and started walking out of the classroom. "Panera Bread is healthier."

"But that doesn't mean that bagles are _unhealthy_."

Orange smirked. Out on the parking deck, he approached the driver's side of a red car and unlocked the doors. "It doesn't matter how sound your reasoning is. I'm driving."

Looking at the other boy over the top of the car, Slaine said, "I'm not really about that 'getting into cars with strangers' life." He had to shout over the sound of the car starting, "Slaine Troyard!"

"Inaho Kaizuka."

Slaine hopped in on the passenger's side and buckled his seatbelt. "As payback for your choice of venue, I'm going to pay you back by making your life hell for however long this drive takes." As he pulled out of the campus lot, Slaine quipped, "Hope you drive fast, Inaho."

Without warning, Inaho floored the gas and then just as quickly slammed on the brakes. Slaine thanked God they hadn't left the campus and pulled onto any actual roads yet.

"What in the _hell_ was that?" Slaine shouted, holding one hand over his heart while he used the other to adjust the seatbelt that had nearly strangled him.

"A safely calculated risk," he replied. He stared at the road ahead of him, though in Slaine's opinion it was pretty damn late to be an attentive driver _now_.

Slaine leaned his head in the window and sighed, expelling his panic. "Risks, by their very definition, aren't safe." Rubbing his neck, he complained, "You could've given me whiplash, you lunatic."

Inaho shook his head. "I accelerated precisely enough to jolt you, but not enough to cause any adverse effects." He took one hand off the wheel and tugged at his seatbelt, which was not locked into place like Slaine's. "I'm heavier than you. I wasn't jostled enough to even trigger the safety."

"Gee, thanks."

Slaine rolled his eyes. He couldn't believe this. But he had to. His intuitive nature demanded he take every experience at face value before he retreated into his thoughts to process it. And if the first two minutes of this car ride were any indication, he would have a lot more experiences to take in before he could process them.

"Do you want to put some music on?" Slaine asked.

"Feel free."

"Ah, um"—Slaine looked from his phone to the auxillary cord—"Don't you want to? It's your car."

"Pass."

Interesting. He had been so eager to exert control before—choosing Panera over Slaine's suggestion, flooring the car just to prove a point—so why was he deviating from that pattern now? Unless he had more of a reason to yield than to dominate. And the only reason Slaine could think of was the very same reason why he had asked Inaho if he wanted music in the first place.

"You want to see my music taste," Slaine smirked knowingly.

Slaine rarely listened to music in the car. He liked to focus all his attention on one task at a time, and if he played music while driving, he wouldn't be able to fully surrender himself to either activity. He had asked for music because he wanted to know what Inaho listened to.

The left corner of Inaho's lip twitched upwards for a fifth of a second.

"An involuntary movement of the levator anguli oris, a microexpression." Slaine laughed. "At least, that's what they're calling it on TV shows these days. Everyone knows it's B.S., but it's still pretty entertaining."

Inaho snorted. "You watch that crap?"

Slaine reddened a little. "Like I'm ever going to play any of my music for you now." He unplugged his phone from the cable. "I've decided I'm going to annoy you by making myself a mystery."

It looked like they were going to be stuck in lunchtime traffic for a while, so Slaine slipped his headphones in and turned on quiet white noise in order to hold himself to his game of irritating Orange. The less he talked, the less he gave away. But as a life science enthusiast, he well knew the fact that language wasn't the only form of communication. He kept his body language relaxed and indifferent, not openly inviting yet not closed off, either. That was his normal stance, but he had loosened up quite a bit while talking to Inaho. He held his head forward, but his gaze slanted off to the side as he watched the driver from his peripheral vision. Inaho's back was straight, his legs spread, but not too much, because everything was always just right with him. He didn't seem particularly bothered by the stand-still traffic, but that didn't surprise Slaine. He hadn't pegged Inaho for someone who was prone to road rage.

Slaine's phone vibrated. He glanced at Inaho before he checked it.

 _Seylum, 1:43 P.M.—Rayet told me you're going out to lunch with someone. Before you ask, Inko told her about it._

 _Slaine, 1:44 P.M.—Oh._

Seylum was Slaines only close friend, was something of a vicarious friend, as she was amicable with Seylum, and by association with the redhead he knew Inko. By Inko, he knew Nina. It was a complicated food chain of personal relationships, but, put simply, most of his "friends" were people he knew second-hand and third-hand through Seylum and her friends.

 _Seylum, 1:46 P.M.—Maybe Kaizuka can coax something more than one of those sad smiles out of you. Inko had a lot to say about him. Call me later and tell me about your lunch!_

 _Seylum, 1:46 P.M.—I want to see a picture of you two!_

 _Seylum, 1:46 P.M.—Pics or it didn't happen!_

 _Slaine, 1:48 P.M.—Yeah, yeah, princess._

Slaine snorted, unable to keep himself from grinning into his screen.

"Is this part of your mysterious act?" Inaho said, tilting his head at the blond.

"There's nothing mysterious about my cousin, trust me."

Slaine, with a resigned heave of his shoulders, unbuckled his seatbelt and sat on top of the console between the seats.

"What are you—"

He leaned an elbow on Inaho's shoulder and pointed the camera at their faces.

"Pics or it didn't happen."


	3. 3

3

 _Why did the orange fail his driving test?_

 _He kept peeling out._

* * *

Slaine reached for the door handle when they pulled into the parking lot of Panera Bread. Inaho had already gotten out, so the blond started in surprise when the doors locked from the outside. He groaned. It didn't take his keen sense of intuition to know that when in the company of Inaho Kaizuka, you might as well just go along with anything that happened. Because something was _bound_ to happen. A few seconds after the doors had locked, a pair of blank red eyes appeared at the window. The doors unlocked, and Inaho opened the passenger door, holding out his hand to Slaine.

"My lady," he intoned.

Slaine slapped his hand away, entirely uncertain whether to be offended or just downright confused.

"You ass," Slaine said at last, when they were already on their way inside.

"Just testing your reaction to perceived threats against your masculinity."

Slaine blew a stray piece of hair out of his eyes. Time for a haircut again soon. Seylum would love that.

"Oh, good. Really, the world is happy to have you as its walking masculinity exam."

"You were more embarrassed than offended," Inaho noted.

"I'm going to the bathroom." Slaine excused himself without further commentary.

As soon as the door swung shut behind him, he pressed his back against it and closed his eyes, breathing heavily. This boy, how could _he_ be the face of logic? This boy, reckless and teasing. This boy, who seemed to know how to pluck emotion out of others while remaining immune to it himself. This boy, the face of pure logic. . . how could he behave so humanly yet so clinically aloof all at once?

And he, Slaine, why was he so affected by all this? Inaho was only half of what Slaine had expected. He was cool and utterly rational, but in some ironically unquantifiable way, Inaho was human, and Slaine's intuition had not prepared him to expect that.

Slaine pressed his palms over his eyes. _I'm frustrated because. . . because I've finally found something that I don't understand._

Understanding, as one might expect of an intuitive, came naturally to Slaine. He just _knew,_ most of the time without knowing _how._ And he had turned out to be right enough times to construct his entire personality, his entire life, around that phenomenon of intuitive knowledge. So when he found, for the first time in his life, that he _didn't_ know. . .

It was scary. If he couldn't have ever said why his intuition worked, then it meant that now he couldn't say why it _wasn't_ working. He didn't know why the machine had stopped working, which meant that he didn't have a clue how to fix it. A series of spiraling corollaries from one simple, innocuous given statement.

 _I don't understand._

Slaine didn't know what to do now. This was not only uncharted territory; it was territory he hadn't even known existed.

He took deep, measure breaths while he splashed cold water on his face. _Be a cartographer. Catalogue, study everything. Find out why the machine's broken. Tinker with it. Fix it._

 _But what if my intution's failed me permanently?_

 _That can't be possible. You've been exposed to millions of situations, and the fact that your intuition is only now failing means that the cause of that failure is external._

 _The cause is Inaho._

Slaine laughed as he pushed the bathroom door open. "Damn Orange."

 _I was interested in him because I thought he would help me understand. How ironic this has turned out to be._

"What are you thinking about?" Inaho popped the question before Slaine had even pulled out his chair to sit down.

"Cloudbursts."

It wasn't a lie. In a way, he had been thinking about a cloudburst. Inaho just didn't need to know that Slaine was referring to him.

"If you were caught in one, what would you do?" The brunet said, though he looked more interested in his menu at the moment.

"By definition, they're unexpected, so of course, I'd be unprepared." Slaine flipped through the menu with a frown drawing down his lips. "Truthfully? I would shield my eyes and head. At first."

"But then?"

"After I got over my shock, I'd be curious. I would look up at the sky. And I would think. And I would dream. And I would wonder."

Inaho folded his menu. "I see."

"What would you do?"

"Get the roasted turkey and alvocado BLT," Inaho stated. He tapped the picture of the sandwich on Slaine's menu.

Leaving thoughts of cloudbursts behind—thought not quite yet. If he were to run with his metaphor of Inaho as a cloudburst, then he had literally (metaphorically) just asked, "What would a cloudburst do in a cloudburst?"

And the answer would be, simply, what cloudbursts do.

Until Slaine figured out what cloudbursts did, that answer would mean nothing. But once he knew, it would mean everything.

"I'll have what he said," Slaine told the waiteress, "and water."

Inaho raised an eyebrow. "I anticipated more recalcitrance on your part."

Slaine merely smiled. "What a mystery."

When the waitress returned with their drinks, Slaine looked at them and gasped as if he had been burned.

"Are you all right?" She looked at him with concern.

"I'm sorry." Slaine's mouth pressed into a thin, sad smile. "You lost someone."

She jumped, muttering a startled "oh!" Her eyes focused anywhere but on him, and her hands picked at her clothes. "T-that was over a year ago. Do I really look that sad?"

"No." Slaine closed his eyes, slowly, as if they were sighing. "No, no you don't. You don't look sad at all, yet you are."

Slaine didn't need to open his eyes to know that in about three seconds she would excuse herself and make an exit. He didn't look to see her go. He felt bad, really, for unfairly calling her out. Usually he kept his insights to himself, but his confidence had been shaken. He needed to know if he was right, if his intuition still worked. Bowing his head, he whispered, "Forgive me. May your lost one rest in peace."

He leaned his head back against the wall of the booth. Damn, sometimes it sucked to be right. Causing a stranger unnecessary pain for the sake of bolstering his glass faith, it was wrong. He thought about leaving a larger than necessary tip, but he discarded the idea because he would only see it for what it was, an attempt to buy off his conscience.

He wiped his dry eyes for the feeling of absolution the action gave. "Damn." Slaine made a pillow of his arms and hid his face in them. "I feel awful."

"Look." Inaho said, softly.

"Where?"

"Left."

Slaine did. The waitress from before was getting off her shift as another woman walked in and smiled at her. They hugged and kissed on the lips before pulling away to entertwine their hands. The waitress looked directly back at Slaine. She smiled. The couple left, laughing their way out of the door.

Inaho was watching Slaine when he turned his attention back to his own life. Losing one doesn't mean you can't find one. Doesn't mean you'll lose them all. That woman was sad, but she was happy, too. She was both. People could be both.

Inaho—he could be both, hyper-rational and human.

That realization was like seeing two circles that had always been distinct in his mind now merge, the zone of overlap rife with colors and possibilities exploding like. . .

Like a cloudburst.

"My God." Slaine laughed in complete epiphany. "That's so brilliant!" So perfect. It all _made sense_. He laughed hysterically. The butterflies, the butterflies were landing on his nose. "Amazing!"

"Thinking about me again?" Inaho interjected, watching him with a clear expression of amusement and surprise.

"Yes!"

Slaine's mind, swept up in the high of realization, caught up with reality, and the blond blushed, hard. He chugged several swallows of water before he internally combusted and then amended, "Thinking about what you showed me, I meant."

 _It's almost like he was trying to cheer me up._

"How did you know she had lost someone?"

Their food was brought out, and Slaine kept his eyes firmly on the table until the waiter had gone, not wanting to accidentally read him. He responded to Inaho's question a moment after that.

"I just knew." He shrugged. "Believe me, I wish I knew how I do it, too."

"What do you read intuitively from me?"

Slaine groaned. "Please don't ask me that."

Inaho hummed in the back of his throat. "You can't read anything off me." It wasn't a question. It was a conclusion based on evidence and lines of reasoning Slaine would never see.

"That's not true. I can read several things off of you. They just all conflict with each other."

"For example?"

"Not happening," Slaine said. "You'll just laugh at me because intuition isn't as credible as syllogism." He wasn't going to hear his way of thinking demeaned as pure luck or a parlor trick. Not again, not by him. Just because he didn't understand how his mind went from A to B didn't mean there was no effort involved in the process. The effort was hidden from the world, even from Slaine. It was like he was given ingredients and woke up with a gourmet cake in his hands without any memory of what went on in between.

"I don't laugh often," Inaho said.

"Doesn't mean you won't."

"I know how to control my emotions."

"I know how to read emotions."

"Except mine, evidently."

"Damn."

A little smirk flashed across Inaho's face.

Slaine reached across the table for the last piece of Inaho's sandiwich, but a pale hand caught him by the wrist before he could grab it. They stared at each other like that, with Slaine's arm stretched across the table and his wrist in Inaho's hand.

"What are you doing?"

"Tasting."

"Changing the subject."

"That too." Slaine sinfully raised an eyebrow. "What are you gonna do about it?"

Inaho's fingers brushed the underside of Slaine's wrist, feeling for the scar he had found last time. Slaine instinctively moved to jerk his hand away, but Inaho tightened his grip before he could shake him loose. The pads of his fingertips swirled around the soft skin of Slaine's wrist, pressing, gliding, rubbing, exploring the texture of the scar and the surrounding flesh. It was killing Slaine, to know that analytical brain was turned upon investigating _his_ scar, _his_ past, _his_ vulnerability. He was infuriated.

But if you took the scar out of the equation, he was mesmerized. Inaho's red eyes held his unblinkingly, their intensity belying the calculations firing off behind them. His fingers were confident and relentless, but startingly gentle. Slaine was sure his face was flushed. He had always had a fascination with hands.

"What—" He felt light-headed. He swallowed. "What are you doing?"

"Mystery."


End file.
